Rambling from a WebDevel

stuff multinational internet companies don’t get

There are a few things multinational internet companies don’t seem to understand:

Location and language don’t always match – even when a users are proficient with the local official language, they may still prefer to use a different language – but there are a lot of users who may not be proficient enough to use the native language or who may feel more comfortable with a different language. A lot of this multinational companies have most of their content in multiple languages, the only question is, why the hell do you guys keep connecting language and location together – I understand that there may be exceptions – like contacts who may be tied up with the local laws, but other than that, just allow users to choose the language they want for your interface.

Gift Cards are very useful – there are multiple reasons for people to use gift cards to add credit to their accounts in your websites – because they don’t trust you enough to not abuse or lose their credit cards, because they don’t have a credit card, because they want their kids to use your services but want to control how much they spend without having to approve every single transaction, because they collect the gift cards they buy to refill their credit, because they fell like it. If you don’t have gift cards for sale in every corner of the globe, you should.

People travel around – that is true in America as well, some US citizens go to Mexico or Canada now and then, but Europe is made of very small countries, which means that people cross borders all the time.

People don’t really care about border – and that is specially important for your gift cards – if someone who leaves in one country goes on vacation to a different country and buys a gift card for your services, they expect it to work with their account, it doesn’t matter if their account was created in the other side of the unnatural line.

Give us the content – if in every country you are available you have the same catalog of content (movies, books, music, tv shows, etc) as the local competitors, and the account is connected to the location of the user, what is the point on having an account with a big company? It’s time to kill borders for content. Users don’t care what the content managers think is the best for them, users just want what is best for them, and even if some users want to wait for the subtitles of the movies and TV shows to be available in their local language, other users just want the most recent episode of their favorite TV show as soon as possible, and are willing to pay for it – but will gladly get it from some torrent if the companies they are paying for content don’t give it for them. Stop negotiating content country by country, force the content owners to license world wide – to everyone, not just you. Help lobbying the politicians to kill borders for copyright. We don’t live in that world anymore!

To be fair, I understand that not everything in this list is directly in the hand of the big corporations. But some of them are: Location and Language is a matter of design, having gift card is a matter of find a few partners to implement it with, and allow them to be used cross border is, at most, a matter of accounting that is not that hard to solve.

And those three alone would be a good improvement for must migrant users of your services.